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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Hands On With Parallels Access: Desktops Apps on the Tablet

Tablets are great for lots of things, and the growth in tablets applications, even for productivity purposes, has been nothing short of amazing. But there are times when you need a traditional Windows PC or Mac application, but still want to be mobile. If you do this a lot, you likely carry a notebook PC. However, there is another answer—remote access to your desktop or laptop from a tablet or possibly even a phone.

In a corporate environment, I've done this with products like Citrix Receiver and its XenDesktop product line; and I've found it works quite well. I use XenDesktop or XenApp all the time from a notebook, just because a keyboard is handy, but I have used it with an iPad as well and been quite happy with performance. The other choices are Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client and VMware Horizon. But these products are really aimed at enterprise users—you need properly configured servers and licensing to make it work. As a result, they aren't really choices for the typical individual or small business user.

Enter Parallels Access, which offers pretty much the same functionality but tailored for an individual user. With this product, you install software on each PC or Mac you want to access and then put the Parallels Access client on the iPad or Android tablet you want to use to access desktop programs and files. (It also works on an iPhone or Android phone, but for me, PC and Mac applications just look small for those screens.)

I've used Parallels Access 2.0 on an iPad and several Android tablets and have been impressed at how well it works. I've tried this mostly with PC applications and have found things like Microsoft Word and Excel to be quite responsive.

When you launch Parallels Access, you'll see an app launcher, which gives you quick access to your applications, letting you launch them pretty much as if they were native applications with the kind of icons that are large enough to easily use from a touch screen. The package picks up many of the apps, and you can easily add others. Alternatively, you can launch File Explorer to open any file the same way you would on a Windows desktop.

While using applications, you tap the screen with one finger to click, and with two fingers to right-click. You can also magnify text by tapping and holding down your finger.

What I find most interesting is how well Access adapts applications to work more like native ones. On an iPad, you see little "pins and buttons" to select text; on Android, you see "selection handles" instead—in both cases, it looks a lot like the native experience. I can't say this always worked perfectly for me—getting the selection in the right place is still much easier with a mouse than with your fingers—but it worked pretty well. There's also an app switcher that makes it easy to switch among multiple applications on your desktop more easily.

The original version of Parallels Access worked only on the iPad; the new version adds Android and iPhone support. On iPads and iPhones, Access now includes a File Browser, basically a touch-friendly way of looking at the files on the remote machine. Also on iOS, you can use the microphone, handy for something like a dictation application, though I didn't really try this out.

One interesting feature for Android devices lets you set a desktop application as a normal Android icon, so you can just click on it to start the session, connect to the remote machine, and launch the application. It's a nice convenience.

The big competition to something like Parallels Access or indeed any other remote access solution is the growing prevalence of equivalent tablet apps. Such apps tend to be more designed for the mobile experience and particularly for touch screens, though often they have fewer features.For instance, Microsoft Word and Excel for iPad are both easier to use with a touch screen than their Windows or Mac equivalents, but if you want to do things like create a table of contents in Word or create an Excel macro, the tablet versions don't cut it. Or perhaps you want to run full Photoshop or MatLab or some custom application that doesn't exist in a tablet version, or just want to get at files connected to your desktop. That's when you need remote access of some sort.

In short, Parallels Access isn't for everyone. But if you're looking for a simple way to access desktop apps from your tablet, it's certainly worth a look.

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